Tag Archives: Safety

By Charles Murray – The Boeing Co. took the issue of 787 battery fires head-on last night, definitively declaring that with pending modifications to its lithium-ion battery packs, a “fire can’t begin, develop, or be sustained.”

The key to preventing fires is to carefully control the amount of available oxygen, Mike Sinnett, vice president and chief engineer of the 787 program said. Describing a potential scenario, he explained that the pressure disc in the rear of the enclosure would open after about 1.5 seconds of cell venting. Vented electrolyte would then entrain the air inside the enclosure and “take it overboard… So as long as we keep the vented air out of the battery enclosure, there’s no oxygen to support combustion.” more> http://tinyurl.com/cp5q43s

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Celebrate Thanksgiving Thanksgiving Day is a federal holiday celebrated on the fourth Thursday in November. In the fall of 1621, the Pilgrims held a three-day feast to celebrate a bountiful harvest. Many regard this event as the nation’s first Thanksgiving. … Continue reading →

hurricanes A hurricane is a type of tropical cyclone or severe tropical storm that forms in the southern Atlantic Ocean, Caribbean Sea, Gulf of Mexico, and in the eastern Pacific Ocean. A typical cyclone is accompanied by thunderstorms, and in … Continue reading →

By Kristin Lewotsky – The SPEXER 1000 brings military-class performance to security applications, allowing facilities to monitor a 120° field of view economically across a range as long as 17km (10.6 miles). The complete system is designed for easy installation and integration with command and control systems on stationary and mobile platforms monitoring land, sea, or air.

Conventional radar systems often rotate to cover 360°, but that’s not always necessary in security applications. Often, perimeters can be secured by monitoring specific areas of vulnerability, which speeds up the process while reducing power demand and avoiding the acquisition and processing of unnecessary data. An airport system, for example, could ignore passenger entry points but would need to cover regions at the ends of runways or around the fuel depot. more> http://tinyurl.com/cfwg9xc

NASA – Gene Kranz (foreground, back to camera), an Apollo 13Flight Director, watches Apollo 13 astronaut and lunar module pilotFred Haise onscreen in the Mission Operations Control Room, during the mission’s fourth television transmission on the evening of April 13, 1970. Shortly after the transmission, an explosion occurred that ended any hope of a lunar landing and jeopardized the lives of the crew.

SPACE WATCHUPPER ATMOSPHERE RESEARCH SATELLITE (UARS) UpdateNASA – NASA’s decommissioned Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite (UARS) fell back to Earth between 11:23 p.m. EDT Friday, Sept. 23 and 1:09 a.m. Sept. 24, 20 years and nine days after its launch on a 14-year mission that produced some of the first long-term records of chemicals in the atmosphere. more> http://is.gd/zJ5SX1

NASA – As of Sept. 16, 2011, the orbit of UARS was 140 mi by 155 mi (225 km by 250 km). Re-entry is expected Sept. 23, plus or minus a day. The re-entry of UARS is advancing because of a sharp increase in solar activity since the beginning of this week.

By Marcia Dunn – NASA scientists are doing their best to tell us where a plummeting six-ton satellite will fall later this week. It’s just that if they’re off a little bit, it could mean the difference between hitting Florida or landing on New York. Or, say, Iran or India.

The satellite will break into pieces, and scientists put the odds of it hitting someone at 1-in-3,200. As far as anyone knows, falling space debris has never injured anyone. Nor has significant property damage been reported. That’s because most of the planet is covered in water and there are vast regions of empty land. more> http://is.gd/spkzHT

By S. Julio Friedmann – The world is emitting more carbon dioxide than even the worst-case IPCC models allow. In 2010, roughly 35 billion tons of man-made CO2 entered the atmosphere — about 70 times the weight of all human beings on earth. That annual volume is about seven billion tons more than it was in 2004, largely because of rapid economic growth in developing countries.

Unfortunately, energy technology, on the whole, has not evolved fast enough to cope with the CO2 problem. Novel nuclear reactor research continues, including new fuel cycles (like thorium), proliferation-resistant designs, new “inherently safe” designs, and lower-cost approaches. However, the tragedy of the tsunami-induced reactor failures in Japan has delayed the deployment of new nuclear technologies. more> http://twurl.nl/posymb